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		<title>A greeting card &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2016/11-November/30.xhtml&gt;</title>
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		<header>
			<h1>A greeting card</h1>
			<p>Day 00634: <time>Wednesday, 2016 November 30</time></p>
		</header>
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2016/11/30.jpg" alt="Another apartment complex" class="framed-centred-image" width="811" height="480"/>
<section id="general">
	<h2>General news</h2>
	<p>
		Being able to take the day off yesterday was fantastic, but today, my essay was due.
		I had completed all of my other schoolwork, but I hadn&apos;t even begun my essay.
		Aside from a short walk, my essay&apos;s what I spent the day working on.
	</p>
	<p>
		I found out today that the <a href="https://peppercarrot.com/extras/html/2016_cat-generator/">avatar generator</a> that I talked about yesterday was built in an effort for a <a href="https://peppercarrot.com/">free Web comic</a> to <a href="https://peppercarrot.com/en/article390/my-fight-against-cdn-libraries">rid their website of privacy-adverse <abbr title="content delivery network">CDN</abbr> libraries</a>.
		One thing that needed to be replaced was Gravitar, which provides pseudo-randomized avatars for users that don&apos;t have an avatar set, making it easy to spot when multiple comments come from the same user.
		The cat-based avatar generator was used as the replacement (until the comic started using Disqus as their comment system, despite Disqus <strong>*also*</strong> having privacy issues).
		Anyway, what I learned from this is that there&apos;s a second ongoing free Web comic.
		<a href="http://floraverse.com./">Floraverse</a> isn&apos;t the only one left! Nina Paley had a few free Web comic, but they don&apos;t seem to be in production any longer.
	</p>
	<p>
		As I&apos;ve said before, I&apos;m not Christian and I think that treating arbitrary calendar dates as special is a bad idea.
		Therefore, because of both, I have no interest in December twenty-fifth.
		It&apos;s an arbitrary calendar date and should be treated as such.
		However, I recently came to understand why <a href="/en/weblog/2016/11-November/25.xhtml#general">my mother doesn&apos;t feel that way</a>.
		As my mother seems to have nothing else to live for, I&apos;m trying to do my best to make that day pleasant for them.
		Today, I found <a href="https://libremas.singpolyma.net/">holiday greeting cards covered by the <abbr title="Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International">CC BY-SA 4.0</abbr> license</a>! My mother won&apos;t appreciate (or even know about) the license, but they do love greeting cards and I think that they&apos;l find the ones on the top row to be cute.
		The second row is almost as nice, but my mother doesn&apos;t like snow, so an indoor scene is a better idea for them.
		I&apos;ve ordered a card, and hopefully it will arrive on time.
	</p>
	<p>
		After finishing my coursework and while waiting for this week&apos;s coursework to become available, I started setting up a page of links that I&apos;d like to share.
		It&apos;s pretty skeletal for the time being, but in time, I hope to have quite a list of places that I want people to see.
		I can&apos;t help but feel that I have several such links scattered throughout my journal, but I want to have a concise page of them so that they&apos;re more likely to actually be looked over.
	</p>
	<p>
		My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="university">
	<h2>University life</h2>
	<p>
		I read the case study on the Coca-Cola company, which much to my frustration, claimed that the company keeps its recipes secret in an effort to keep their quality high.
		That doesn&apos;t make any sense! They keep their recipes secret to avoid having to compete with others.
		They do it so that people can&apos;t make the same flavors of soda and mark the prices down.
		If anything, they keep their recipes secret not to keep their own quality high, but to keep the competition&apos;s quality <strong>*low*</strong>! By doing that, The Coca-Cola company is able to make their product seem to be of a higher quality by comparison, but in reality, Coca-Cola would have a better product if they shared their recipe.
		Coca-Cola would either be able to collaborate, taking good changes to the recipe made by others, or they&apos;d be forced to continue to improve their flavor to keep their market share.
		In either case, while the Coca-Cola <strong>*company*</strong> profits from keeping the recipes under lock and key, the Coca-Cola <strong>*product*</strong> suffers from this.
		Arguably, customers also suffer from this secrecy.
	</p>
	<p>
		Supposedly though, Coca-Cola designs all of their packaging to be completely recyclable.
		I don&apos;t mean to say that the Coca-Cola company is all bad, just that this case study misinterprets the company&apos;s hoarding of knowledge as a good thing that promotes quality when in fact it&apos;s a bad thing and harms quality.
	</p>
	<p>
		With that finally done, I began and finished my <a href="/en/coursework/BUS1101/How_Coca-Cola_should_deal_with_globalization.xhtml">essay</a> for the week.
		I can&apos;t help but feel that if I had more time to work on it, it would have come out better.
		However, it can&apos;t really be helped.
		I&apos;ve been far too busy through most of the week, and yesterday, I desperately needed a day off.
		My essay came out better working on it just today after having rested than it would have had I worked on it for two days and not gotten any rest.
		My schoolwork next week will likewise benefit from my day of rest.
		Still though, this essay isn&apos;t as long as my last two.
		While I&apos;ve been making an effort to write double-length essays, this one instead barely goes over the length requirement.
		I&apos;m not going to worry too much about it though.
		There&apos;s only so much time in the day, I have a lot on my plate, and I need rest or I&apos;ll burn myself out.
	</p>
	<p>
		This week, instead of writing an essay, we&apos;re filling out a <a href="/en/coursework/BUS1101/SCAMPER.xhtml">table</a>.
		I don&apos;t understand what we&apos;re supposed to do with the table, but I&apos;m hoping that by the time I finish the reading assignment for the week, I will.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="apartment">
<h2>Apartment hunting</h2>
<p>
	I went on a short walk this morning and found that a section of R Street is lined with apartment complexes, as is at least one of the crossroads.
	I&apos;m probably going to check these complexes tomorrow after work and try to pick up applications there.
</p>
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